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Introduction to Calvin and Hobbes: Sunday Pages 1985-1995 (2001)

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Re: Introduction to Calvin and Hobbes: Sunday Pages 1985-1995 (2001)

#111

Post by TheAmazingRace »

tracerbulletx wrote: post #91
TheAmazingRace wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To each their own, but the book would never have sold any copies if Bill's name wasn't attached to it. I purchased a copy on Amazon and thought I was hoodwinked. It felt like a pure cash grab.

Imagine accusing a guy who could with a stroke of a pen have earned many millions of dollars in royalties and didn't for purely artistic purity reasons of a cash crab. What a silly thing to say.

And I admire him for his principles during that time. That said, regarding “The Mysteries”, I just feel that others wax poetic about it because of Bill. If anyone else was attached to this book, nobody would give a damn. I’m sorry I expected more and am hype resistant. And I say this as someone that loved Calvin and Hobbes.

To be fair to Bill… he didn’t hype up anything about it. The media did. It was heralded as the second coming and, much like Duke Nukem Forever, some things are best left in the past. It’s ok.

Re: Introduction to Calvin and Hobbes: Sunday Pages 1985-1995 (2001)

#112

Post by po »

carbonguy wrote: post #90
po wrote: post #53

My sister just came to visit me in Tokyo and asked what to bring as a gift... I said, "If you can, please bring my Calvin and Hobbes collection for my kids to read." My 10 and 6 year olds have been devouring them ever since. There is something electric and timeless about these strips. I am certain they don't understand all of the vocabulary but still they read it. It is a format that lures kids in and then uses that…

I have a nephew turning six this year and have been considering getting him some of the collections as well, wondering if it would have the same formative impact on him as on me. I remember reading the strip in the paper as a six-year-old blonde kid and coming away with the impression that there was nothing weird about daydreaming all the time, or being articulate, or having an aversion to team sports, etc. all of wh…

My 6 year old loves the colorful Sunday ones... but he has me read them to him and I don't think for many of them he doesn't 'get it' yet. My guess is that the truly ideal age is around 9 or 10. That being said, I think there's no wrong time to introduce them.

Re: Introduction to Calvin and Hobbes: Sunday Pages 1985-1995 (2001)

#113

Post by TheAmazingRace »

barbecue_sauce wrote: post #86
TheAmazingRace wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To each their own, but the book would never have sold any copies if Bill's name wasn't attached to it. I purchased a copy on Amazon and thought I was hoodwinked. It felt like a pure cash grab.

Did you just, like, purchase it without having any concept of what it was? It's certainly different from Calvin and Hobbes, but there was no indication that it wouldn't be. Making a fairly artistic book with niche appeal is actually the opposite of a cash grab.

Perhaps. But I get the sense from folks here that anyone who once did massive hits (like Calvin and Hobbes) are simply beyond reproach, which is ridiculous to me. Even as an art book, the art feels weirdly AI-like to me and not particularly special. Again, personal opinion. I thought it was overrated for what it was.

Everyone is free to buy it to support him though if they feel differently about it.

Re: Introduction to Calvin and Hobbes: Sunday Pages 1985-1995 (2001)

#114

Post by bigstrat2003 »

sircastor wrote: post #95
tomrod wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ST:TNG goes into quite a bit of on-the-ground imagining of the lives of Federation individuals and Star Fleet. Colonies, research stations, etc. Though the only earth-side I remember is Jean Luc's winery and estate or when the admiral was mind controlled by some kind of pest.

Part of the challenges of early TNG is that it tries to make the federation perfect. The writing suffers because of it because there appear to be no true internal conflicts. It’s not until Roddenberry takes a back seat in the creative process that the writing starts to get really good. Though that might also in part be the departure of Maurice Hurley as show runner.

When Paramount released the HD remaster of TNG on Blu-ray, I really enjoyed watching the lengthy (like 2 hours per season) documentary they did on the making of the show. And sadly, one thing was abundantly clear watching that documentary: TNG was good despite Roddenberry, not because of him. The writers all talk about how hard it was to write any sort of interesting story when you were forbidden from showing conflict between the main cast of characters.

Re: Introduction to Calvin and Hobbes: Sunday Pages 1985-1995 (2001)

#115

Post by mdp2021 »

JasonFruit wrote: post #94
mdp2021 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Berkeley Breathed could feel left out - and one of his collections was named "Classics of Western Literature".

He should. His work has political and cultural significance, and only that: no literary value. I say that as someone who put too much time into reading Bloom County when I was younger.

> literary value

Not everyone has to be Joyce - there is literary value in more humble works and intentions, and Breathed's Bloom County was sublime in its preposterous ideas. Not perfect, not an Everest - a "local maximum", relatively a peak, if dwarfed by other works in more specialized, high-brow efforts.

Re: Introduction to Calvin and Hobbes: Sunday Pages 1985-1995 (2001)

#116

Post by TeMPOraL »

hnlmorg wrote: post #69
rsynnott wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> After all, the Federation from Star Trek is pretty much the only well-known case of an utopia that actually works in fiction writing Eh. I mean, by Voyager/DS9 it has secret police, and _literal mine slaves_ (old-model sentient holographic doctors). And it appears to be _basically_ a military dictatorship; the civil government in practice always seems to be subordinate to Starfleet. It also happily trades away inha…

All the negative sides you’ve described is portrayed after Gene Roddenberry died and he was famously against a lot of those concepts while he was alive. DS9 would never have been green-lit during Roddenberry’s lifetime. > We also don’t see that much of how Federation _civilians_ live, and a lot of what we do see frankly isn’t that great. That’s not true. The worlds that aren’t great are planets outside of federation…

> In the DS9 episode I’m thinking of, shapeshifters (“changelings”) had taken over Star Fleet (the military)

It was even more interesting than that - they didn't take Starfleet over at all! They bombed a conference and sow some fear in the backchannels, and then sat back to watch as Starfleet panicked. A few well-positioned people tried to pull a military coup, for more-less the same reason the US gave up on many of its freedoms after 9/11, but unlike in real world, they were denounced by the rest of the military, the coup was stopped, and the entire two-parter served as a strong message that it's fear, not attacks from outside, that can quickly destroy the utopia.

Basically, a Star Trek take on "people willing to trade their freedom for temporary security deserve neither and will lose both" - noticed on time and successfully averted.

> DS9 would never have been green-lit during Roddenberry’s lifetime.

Gene would be wrong about this, IMHO. DS9 is the series that makes the utopia seem more real, as it gives it cracks and puts pressure on them, to show how people can overcome them. It makes the Federation seem less like religion, and more like just great future overall.

Re: Introduction to Calvin and Hobbes: Sunday Pages 1985-1995 (2001)

#118

Post by TeMPOraL »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #114
sircastor wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the challenges of early TNG is that it tries to make the federation perfect. The writing suffers because of it because there appear to be no true internal conflicts. It’s not until Roddenberry takes a back seat in the creative process that the writing starts to get really good. Though that might also in part be the departure of Maurice Hurley as show runner.

When Paramount released the HD remaster of TNG on Blu-ray, I really enjoyed watching the lengthy (like 2 hours per season) documentary they did on the making of the show. And sadly, one thing was abundantly clear watching that documentary: TNG was good despite Roddenberry, not because of him. The writers all talk about how hard it was to write any sort of interesting story when you were forbidden from showing conflic…

> The writers all talk about how hard it was to write any sort of interesting story when you were forbidden from showing conflict between the main cast of characters.

And the show was all the better for it. Writers are lazy, too, and conflict between main characters is by far the cheapest way of creating drama, and the main way fiction differs from reality. Being strongly discouraged from using this shortcut is what gave TNG-era Star Trek another unique feature, that's almost unseen in shows and movies (sci-fi or otherwise): the main cast, and Starfleet in general, are portrayed as competent professionals who are good at their jobs and work well together. It's kind of what you'd expect from people whose dayjob is flying around on FTL-capable WMD platforms.

But yeah, Roddenberry had various peculiarities that needed pushback on. Constraints breed creativity, I guess?

Re: Introduction to Calvin and Hobbes: Sunday Pages 1985-1995 (2001)

#119

Post by TeMPOraL »

AlchemistCamp wrote: post #83
TeMPOraL wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Star Trek is "What if Communism but it wasn't influenced by human nature On the contrary, the very premise of Star Trek is "what if humans overcome the bad parts of their nature, and embraced the good ones". The core concept of the entire franchise, coming from Gene himself, is that humanity must be recognizably human to the audience, just better than what it is now . The Federation being fully automated communist…

Yeah, that really is its fatal flaw. The only really good Star Trek series I saw was DS9. It was darker, had longer story arcs, religion and fully developed characters. There was even a scene that illustrated this, where Captain Sisko was talking with an Earth politician and telling him that the problem was he lived on Earth, a paradise, and couldn't understand the war and problems those near DS9 faced.

"It's easy to be a saint in paradise."

DS9 was really good. But all the shade it threw at the underlying premise was still to reinforce it, not break it. Where any other show would take e.g. the above case of the Federation governance being out of touch with needs of their constituents near the border, and deconstruct it six ways to Sunday in most cynical of fashions, DS9 made the paradise something good, if fragile, and worth fighting for, worth aiming to have here - whether "here" is out there in lthe frontier colonies, or back today in the 21th century real-world. That's why I still say it was an aspirational show, if much darker, and worked to reinforce TNG instead of deconstructing it.

Re: Introduction to Calvin and Hobbes: Sunday Pages 1985-1995 (2001)

#120

Post by gandalfgreybeer »

TheAmazingRace wrote: post #111
tracerbulletx wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine accusing a guy who could with a stroke of a pen have earned many millions of dollars in royalties and didn't for purely artistic purity reasons of a cash crab. What a silly thing to say.

And I admire him for his principles during that time. That said, regarding “The Mysteries”, I just feel that others wax poetic about it because of Bill. If anyone else was attached to this book, nobody would give a damn. I’m sorry I expected more and am hype resistant. And I say this as someone that loved Calvin and Hobbes. To be fair to Bill… he didn’t hype up anything about it. The media did. It was heralded as the…

I think what the person who replied to you is primarily reacting to is the term “cash grab”. And that is what I will focus on.

You yourself mentioned that Bill did not hype up anything about it, nor did you really counter with any arguments to prove that it was financially motivated.

I myself have not read it, but just because it was not what you expected or what the media portrayed it to be does not make it a “cash grab”.

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